A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE: THE URBAN POOR
The most crucial form of openness we will need, if we really mean to have open-minded public space, is openness to the urban underclass. This class of people is as old as urban life itself and a recurrent heartache to people who care about cities. Cities and metropolitan areas have frequently acted as magnets for many people whom they couldn’t—or in any case didn’t—assimilate. The people left out become residents of shantytowns, squatters in abandoned buildings, sleepers in the subways or the streets, dealers in illegal and dangerous commodities, victims and perpetrators of violence, potential recruits for mobs, cults, the underworld and, since the Age of Revolution, for radical movements of Left and Right. Many of them are immigrants and refugees, but others are long-time residents displaced by the city’s changes. Anyone who wants to claim a share of public space in a modern city is forced to share it with some of the people of the underclass, and so to think about where he stands in relation to them.
The range of possible responses to this situation was delineated brilliantly a century ago by Baudelaire in a prose poem he wrote in the 1860s, “The Eyes of the Poor.” The poem tells the story of a loving couple who are spreading their love along a newly completed Parisian boulevard and who come to rest in a glittering new outdoor cafe. Actually, the boulevard is not quite finished: there is still a pile of rubble on the street. Suddenly a family in rags steps out from behind the rubble, and walks directly up to the lovers. (Baudelaire’s audience knew that the rubble in the picture was probably all that was left of the family’s neighborhood, one of the dozens of ancient, impoverished neighborhoods that Baron Haussmann’s gigantic urban renewal projects destroyed.) As the poet presents these people, they are not asking for anything: They are just looking around, enjoying the bright lights. But the lovers are embarrassed by the immense social gulf between them and these ragged people who, thanks to the boulevard, are physically close enough to touch. “I felt a little ashamed of our glasses and decanters,” the narrator says, “too big for our thirst.” Baudelaire’s middle-class protagonists have got to respond, not merely to the ragged people in their midst, but also to what these people make them feel about themselves.
Baudelaire’s narrator responds in a way that will come to typify the urban Left: He looks into their eyes, tries to express sympathy and empathy, conceives of them and himself as united in a human “family of eyes.” His girlfriend responds in a radically different way that can be said to typify the urban Right: “These people are unbearable with their big saucer eyes. Can’t you call the maître to send them away?”
More than a century after Baudelaire’s death, urban Americans are still living inside the parameters of his poem. We are faced with a very large underclass, and the people in this class don’t want to go away; they, too, want a place in the bright light. And their presence in public space forces us to think not only about their place but also about our own.
Walzer believes (as I do) that fear of the underclass is one of the main forces that has led America’s urban middle class to flee the open-minded cities they have made, and to settle into (and settle for) a single-minded suburban environment that is less risky but a lot less alive. He also believes that many people who grew up in that closed world have grown sick of it and are now “ready for the pleasures and willing to pay the costs of urbanity.”
I hope he is right. But once again he undermines his long-range aims by getting entangled in the very middle-class anxieties and self-deceptions that he is trying to overcome. Thus he proclaims a dualism of successful versus unsuccessful streets. “A successful street,” he said, “is self-policing.” Policing is meant to fend off all the elements of “an unsuccessful street,” which “by contrast always seems inadequately policed, dangerous, a place to avoid.” What are these bad elements? Walzer casts his net very wide, and comes up with “social, sexual, and political deviance: derelicts, criminals, political and religious sectarians, adolescent gangs.” Rather than subject themselves to close encounters with these kinds, “ordinary men and women flee as soon as they can into private and controlled worlds.”
Now, as an account of the way many people feel, this is undoubtedly accurate. The modern world is full of people who are terrified of other people, socially, sexually, or politically different from themselves. But Walzer seems to take their terrors at face value, to understand them as plain facts, or alternately as eternal laws of social physics, rather than as the historically relative and socially conditioned ideologies that they are.
Thus, when we encounter categories like success/failure or normal/deviant, we need to ask: By what criteria? By whose criteria? For what purposes? In whose interests? When we hear about successful public spaces, we should ask: Successful for what? Who benefits from a police definition of success, that is, success as absence of trouble? (By this definition, most of the great public spaces in history—Greek agoras, Italian piazzas, Parisian boulevards—would rate as failures, because all were turbulent places, and needed large police forces to keep the seething forces from exploding. On the other hand, some of the world’s most sterile shopping malls would rate as shining successes.) Walzer himself explains who benefits from this: the upscale merchants and real estate promoters who want public space to be nothing but an unending golden shower of big spenders. But these people and their interests are, as Walzer shows, the greatest menace to free public space today; optimal success for them would mean total destruction of public life for all of us. When Walzer accepts their image of successful space, he loses hold on his own critical perspective and his deepest beliefs.
Walzer gets caught up in his enemies’ values once more when he adopts the dualism of “ordinary men and women” versus “deviants.” Why should he accept an ideology that stigmatizes difference as “deviance” and that considers it normal to flee from anybody different from ourselves? After all, any idea of normality is a norm and as such necessitates a choice of values. Why doesn’t Walzer insist on standards of success and normality that square with his own values? Then he could see that the real failures in public space are not the streets full of social, sexual, and political deviants but rather the streets with no deviants at all. And he could fight for a truly open-minded idea of normality: the capacity to interact with people radically different from ourselves, to learn from them, to assimilate what they have to give, maybe even to change our lives, to grow, without ceasing to be our selves.
Walzer concedes grudgingly that his various “deviant” groups “belong, no doubt, to the urban mix.” But he warns that they had better not get “too prominent within it.” In other words, the people of the underclass (along with all the other deviants) can be tolerated, so long as they keep their place on the outer fringes of public space. I would argue, on the contrary, that there isn’t much point in having public space, unless these problematical people are free to come to the very center of the scene. The reason for this is not that they are so lovely to look at (though some of them are, just like some of us). The reason is that they are there, part of the same city and the same society as ourselves, linked with us in a thousand ways that would take a lifetime to fully understand. The glory of modern public space is that it can pull together all the different sorts of people who are there. It can both compel and empower all these people to see each other, not through a glass darkly but face to face.
One reason I get so persistent about the urban underclass is that I have spent the last fifteen years working with students who come from that class, who have grown up looking at the life of the city through the eyes of the poor. On lucky days